


durch ein winziges wort

by nameless_bliss



Series: An Imbalanced Social Dynamic [2]
Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Alcohol, Canon Compliant, Explicit Language, Fluff with a Sprinkle of Angst, Gen, Lots of alcohol, M/M, Missing Scene, POV Stevie Budd, Past Patrick/Rachel, Present Tense, a fun platonic sleepover, discussion of past relationships, they drink and talk about feelings and that's all folks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:39:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27560134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nameless_bliss/pseuds/nameless_bliss
Summary: Stevie looks down at the rings, nestled safely in their little velvet box.God, she hopes she’s had enough beer to do this.She takes a deep breath, and looks up at Patrick. “Why would I say no?”“If you think it’s a bad idea. If you think I shouldn’t—”“Patrick,” she says, and she puts everything she possibly can into it. “If I said no, right now. Why would that be my answer?”In hindsight, Stevie probably should have been able to guess that when Patrick invited her over for a post-rehearsal drink, it meant he was up to something.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer & Stevie Budd, Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Series: An Imbalanced Social Dynamic [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2014489
Comments: 49
Kudos: 279





	durch ein winziges wort

“Get me another beer.”

“Do you not remember where the fridge is?”

“I am sore, jackass.” Stevie wiggles her aching feet in Patrick’s direction. “Some of us actually had to do shit at that rehearsal.”

“Hey!” Patrick gasps with mock indignation. “I was working very hard.”

“You’re not even _in_ ‘Don’t Tell Mama’.”

“Excuse you, I introduce it!”

“I will fucking kill you.”

Patrick laughs, but he gets up anyway—which is good, because Stevie is far too weak to actually kill anyone in this state. It’s not even that the choreography today was _hard,_ but it made her move her body in ways she’s never had to, leaving her deeply sore in muscles she didn’t even know about. Meanwhile, Patrick got to show up two hours later for his cushy little music rehearsal. Bastard didn’t even have to break a sweat. Stevie’s not sure she would have agreed to come over for drinks if she’d known how dead she’d be, and how infuriatingly _fine_ Patrick would be. 

Maybe she can force him to dance for an hour while she gets to sit and watch. In the interest of fairness. After a couple more beers, he might be persuaded. 

“It’s a trade-off,” Patrick says as he opens the fridge. “You have to do more choreography, but you get to avoid the _joy_ of dialect rehearsals. It has to even out somehow.”

“Sorry, is anyone else drinking a raw egg on stage every night?” Stevie tilts her head. “No? Just me? Then you can shut the fuck up about who has the _easier_ job.”

Patrick just laughs again as he brings two open beers back over to the bed. Stevie takes hers, and bitterly cheers-es him before he has a chance to goad her into it. And since she’s basically only here in hopes that she can get drunk enough to stop feeling the throbbing in her feet, she knocks back a solid half of the bottle without pausing for breath. Luckily, Patrick’s taste in beer is slightly superior to his taste in whiskey. 

Stevie closes her eyes, and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and waits for the sweet relief of numbness.

When she opens her eyes, Patrick is still standing there. He’s holding his beer in both hands, thumbs picking at the label. His face is… weird.

“What?” Stevie asks warily. His weird faces are never a good sign.

“Can I show you something?”

“I don’t want to see your cock.”

“Wh—” Patrick’s jaw flaps a few times. “Why the _hell_ is that where your mind went?!”

“When guys want to show me something, it’s usually their cock.”

“I think you need to find some better guys to talk to.”

“One of them was David,” she retorts, just to be an ass.

Patrick’s not bothered, though. He just gives her a _look._ “Can I show you something that has nothing to do with any part of my anatomy?”

Stevie downs another notable portion of her beer. “If you must.”

“Thanks,” Patrick says, deadpan. He grabs the lid of the chest at the foot of the bed. “Can you—?”

Stevie takes her feet off of the chest so he can open it—but she makes some very unhappy noises as she folds her legs underneath her, so he knows how inconvenienced she is. 

Patrick sets his beer on the floor so he can open the chest and rummage, and rummage, and _rummage_ and jesus fuck, how buried is this thing? When he finally re-emerges, it’s with a little black rectangle that hardly seems worth the effort. 

“Here.”

Stevie rolls her eyes as she leans in to grab the box, and she almost makes a joke about how she prefers her dildos a bit bigger than this, but she decides not to, because… Patrick’s face. There’s something going on with his mouth and his eyes, it’s like he knows something, and thinks she knows it too, like they’re in on this together, and Stevie gets a twisting feeling in her chest as she sets her beer between her legs to free her hands. And as she opens the box, she gets hit with the sudden, sharp idea that this might be— 

And it is.

“Holy shit,” she says quietly.

It’s not… it’s not that it’s _surprising,_ really. She’s known about this for months. But still, it’s one thing to know that this is gonna happen at some point in the vague ‘someday’. And it turns out that it’s something else entirely to sit here, holding her best friend’s engagement rings in her hands. 

She swallows, and she breathes.

And once she can manage it, she looks up at Patrick. His hands are stuffed elbow-deep in his pockets, and he’s rocking a bit on the balls of his feet. He raises his eyebrows. “So. What do you think?”

Stevie blinks at him. She keeps breathing. “‘Bout what?”

“Stevie,” he says (and she resists the urge to squirm—like she always does when he says her name, because he always says it like it’s a _thing,_ like it’s a thing with weight and meaning, and that’s not fucking fair). “I want to know if I have your blessing.”

She looks at him. Then she looks down at the rings again, nestled safely in their little velvet box. She’s seen David’s rings more than enough to know that these are perfect: the shape and size of them, the look, the… them. She presses her lips together, and slowly sucks them between her teeth, worrying at the inside of her mouth. 

Patrick doesn’t do anything by accident. For all the time they’ve been spending together lately (both in and out of rehearsal), it’s still unusual for them to drink together. It’s the exception, not the rule. Which means that Patrick meant to do this. He waited until there was booze involved, and even then, he waited until the first couple of beers were already gone. It’s deliberate. Which means one of two things: either he thought the buzz would make her soft and sentimental and more likely to give him gooey approval, or he thought it would make her talk, that it would soften her edges enough to make her honest. 

And since Patrick’s not a moron, it’s pretty fucking obvious which one he meant.

God, she hopes she’s had enough beer to do this.

She takes a deep breath, and looks up at him. “Why would I say no?”

“If you think it’s a bad idea. If you think I shouldn’t—”

“Patrick,” she says, and she puts everything she possibly can into it (to see how he fucking likes it). “If I said no, right now. Why would that be my answer?”

For a moment, he looks at her, and she’s not sure if he knows what she’s asking.

But then he nods. He sits on the chest, one leg tucked under himself. He looks down at his hands, and Stevie can see the gears in his head start to turn.

Finally, he says, “Because I make the same mistakes.”

Stevie takes another slow breath, bracing herself. She didn’t know she was going to be doing _this_ today, and she’s sure as fuck not ready to drop into it like this. It’s been a couple of weeks since Patrick’s surprise party, and that’s enough distance for Stevie to have assumed that the two of them wouldn’t have a postmortem on the whole… all of it. He and David already dealt with it, and she knows that, and she knows that it’s not remotely her place to insert herself into this particular bit of their business.

But now Patrick’s not only _making_ it her place, he’s trapping her in it. And it’s not like there’s any turning back now, is there?

Fucking _Patrick._

“After the Rachel stuff,” she starts, carefully, “you told me you were done. You said you weren’t gonna keep things from him anymore. And _when you said that,_ you were keeping something from him.” She wants so badly to look at anything in this apartment that isn’t him, but she doesn’t let herself. She forces herself to hold his gaze. “So. What the fuck?”

Patrick doesn’t look away either, but it looks like he might be struggling with it as much as she is (and it’s almost a relief to know that _neither_ of them will enjoy this). “It didn’t… feel the same. I knew—” he lets out a breath. “I always thought I’d tell my parents, and then it wouldn’t matter. It was something I was keeping from _them,_ and I would fix it, and then there wouldn’t be anything to tell David. I didn’t mean to hide it from him, I felt like I was just… procrastinating.”

Stevie narrows her eyes. “That’s the best you’ve got? Semantics?” 

Patrick swallows. “I didn’t want him to know. I was embarrassed.”

“You embarrass yourself for him all the time,” Stevie counters. 

“This was different.”

“Why?”

He doesn’t answer. She gives him a second, then another, then ten more… 

“Look,” she sighs, “are we fucking doing this or not?”

She sees his jaw clench. And there’s something… strange, about seeing him, of all people, not wanting to say something. Patrick Brewer always says everything, without hesitating, regardless of the havoc it’ll wreak on the emotions of whoever’s hearing it. This is new, and it’s… Stevie doesn’t think she likes it. The tables have been turned, but they’ve been turned upside down, and now she can see the dirt and old gum that’s been hiding on the underside. 

After seconds of silence that feel like _hours,_ Patrick nods, and rubs a hand across his mouth. “I don’t like needing people. It’s… it’s hard, for me. So I try to avoid it.”

“But you don’t. You ask for help, and it’s fine—if it’s anyone else.” She tilts her head. “David’s the only one you have a problem needing.”

He flinches, and the expression on his face is so goddamn loud she might as well yell ‘bingo’. But instead she raises her eyebrows, and waits him out.

“I’m not used to it,” he says, awkward, like he wants to shrug it off but knows he can’t. “I’m used to being the one who has their shit together, who doesn’t need help, and… yeah. I like that. I like being the—I like being dependable. Helpful.”

“David’s not the designated fuck-up in your relationship,” Stevie snaps. “It’s not his job to always have problems, and your job to always be perfect and fix them.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

He hesitates—and for once, his face is so quiet that she can’t even tell what it’s saying. 

“I’m learning,” he says, eventually. “It’s not what I’m used to, and it—” he presses his lips together. “It’s hard to change. In all my other relationships, it felt like it _was_ my job, to be the stable one. I had to fix things. I had to be perfect.”

“Yeah, and in case you forgot, all of those relationships failed.”

Patrick’s mouth drops open—maybe to say something, maybe just with surprise. He huffs, something like a humorless laugh. “That’s… fair.”

“It’s right,” Stevie corrects, because if he’s making her talk about this, he damn well better be doing it for a reason. “It doesn’t matter what your _job_ was in any of your old relationships, because you’re not in them anymore. You’re with David. And I get that being vulnerable fucking sucks, but, you’re—you’re doing—” She shakes her head. “You like being supportive, and helpful, and you like _being there_ for him. You get that he likes that too, right? He _wants_ to be able to help you?”

“Of course.”

“But you don’t let him. When you have actual shit to deal with, that’s the shit you hide from him. If you just _told_ him this stuff, he’d get to be supportive. But you don’t give him the chance, and you hide it until it blows up in your face, and then if he wants to help, he has to forgive you for breaking his trust—which isn’t easy for him—instead of just getting to fucking _care_ about you like he could have if you’d told him the first place.” 

She stops, and takes a breath… and then another, when the first one doesn’t do any good. She didn’t realize she actually had things to say about this. It’s weird, and she doesn’t think she likes it.

“Pretty fucking selfish, don’t you think?” she asks, voice flat, using the harshness to try and balance out the sincerity.

Patrick looks like he’s calculating, weighing his words. But all he says is, “Yeah.”

Stevie frowns. The point of that was to make him start talking again to give her a fucking break. “Isn’t this the part where you, like. Try to convince me I’m wrong?”

Patrick’s shoulders shake with a quiet, resigned laugh. “Of course not. We both know you’re right.”

“So…” Stevie shrugs. “What? You’re gonna—You think asking him to marry you is gonna make this go away?”

“No,” Patrick says with another laugh, this one much stronger. “I know it won’t. But I don’t want to marry him to try to fix anything. And I don’t want to marry him because I think our relationship is flawless.”

Stevie opens her mouth to snap out a retort, but… she doesn’t have one. She’s losing her footing. “Then, what are we doing here? You just… promise it won’t happen again, so I can—” she wrinkles her nose, “absolve you?”

“You know that’s not what I’m asking you for. And… and you know I can’t promise that.” His posture changes, opening up, straightening and loosening at the same time. “I’d love to tell you that I’ve learned my lesson, and I’ll never make another mistake. But if I said that, I’d be lying. We’re talking about forever. And as much as I’d like to say that I’ll never mess up again, I—” he looks down at his hands, and his mouth softens into a sort-of smile. “I want to spend the rest of my life with him; I’m gonna make mistakes. A lot. We both are, it’s—it’s the rest of our lives.” 

Stevie’s starting to get the feeling again, itchy under her skin and twisty in her stomach. She pushes it down with a flat, unimpressed noise. “You’re not really doing a good job of selling yourself, here.”

Patrick’s smile cracks open into his usual, squishy monstrosity. “Just being honest. Neither of us are perfect now, and I don’t think we’ll be perfect in fifty years, either.”

And that—the time frame, the concrete, inescapable certainty of it—hits Stevie in the chest so unexpectedly that she has to clear her throat to recover from it. 

Patrick either doesn’t notice, or is too polite to call her out on it (and Stevie hates that she knows which one it is). “It’s not a matter of never having problems,” he says, “it’s… always wanting to do better, I guess. Learning, and doing the work. And I want to do that. I want the chance to be better. And I’m better when I’m with him.” He shrugs, like it’s nothing, like this is a nothing conversation.

Stevie blinks. It’s her turn, it’s where she says something back, but… 

She looks down. The rings are still in her hand, waiting. 

She was never going to say no. They needed to do this, but only because he needed to say it, and, yeah. Maybe she needed to hear it, too. But it wouldn’t have been…

Realistically, she knew there was no outcome where she would have had to tell him no. They’re past that. She knows him better than that (and just that thought is enough to make her skin crawl). So it didn’t matter that there was no ‘right answer’ for him in this conversation. It wasn’t a trap or a test or some bullshit. They just needed to do it. And somehow, he’s still managed to give an answer that’s… more right than she was anticipating. 

Maybe she should have known better. Patrick’s always been stupidly good at that kind of shit, at saying things that no actual human being should be shameless enough to say. 

Stevie blinks again. The rings keep staring back at her.

“Can you imagine David Rose planning a wedding?” She looks up at Patrick. “He’s gonna be a nightmare.” It’s not an answer, but she knows it’s the closest she can get.

It does the job, because after a moment, Patrick smiles at her. And it’s his squishiest, sappiest, upside-down-iest _abomination—_ god, if Stevie weren’t so fucking sore she’d probably kick him in the balls just to make it stop. “Yeah,” he says, in a voice that’s as disgusting as his face, “I can’t wait.”

“Eugh.” Stevie shivers with revulsion, and picks up her beer to chug the rest in one go. It’s gotten unpleasantly warm from being nestled in her lap, but she forces it all down because she’s making a point. She maintains significant eye contact with Patrick as she wipes her mouth, and holds out her empty bottle.

Patrick keeps fucking smiling, but it gets twistier and more teasing, so that’s at least something. “Okay.” He takes the bottle from her and heads back to the kitchen.

“Do you think he’ll say yes?” he asks.

“Ew, don’t fish for that. It’s not a good look.”

“What? I’m serious!”

“No you’re fucking not!” She rolls her eyes. “You would never, _never_ propose if you thought there was _any chance_ he wouldn’t say yes. Because you would never risk forcing him into a position where he had to turn you down.”

Patrick laughs as he opens another beer. “Yeah, point taken.” He bumps the fridge door with his hip to close it. “Okay, then, do you think he’ll be surprised?”

Stevie snorts. “The guy who set you up on a date with someone else, like, a month ago? Yeah, no, I don’t think he’s expecting this.”

Patrick groans, and Stevie hopes he’s reliving the misery of the frantic texts and phone calls he’d subjected her to that night—because, as it turns out, keeping a secret like this is fun during games of spin-the-bottle, but not so much during crises about cute boys in polo shirts. 

He brings her the beer, and finally picks his own neglected bottle off the floor. But he doesn’t sit on the chest again. He sits at the foot of the bed, right _fucking_ next to her. They’re not quite touching, but he’s close enough that she can feel his body heat, and the really horrible side effect of spending so many rehearsals having to dance and touch and trust exercise all over each other is that she doesn’t even mind. Patrick sits uncomfortably close to her, and she doesn’t feel uncomfortable. They just clink their beers together, and drink, and it’s fine. Which sucks.

When Stevie finally hands the ring box back to him, Patrick doesn’t close it. He just looks at it with his stupid, _stupid_ face. “Will he approve?”

Stevie wrinkles her nose. “Depends. Are they 24 karat?”

“Nah, they’re spray painted. Got ‘em at Walmart.”

She laughs, without meaning to. “Right.”

Patrick takes another drink, but he still doesn’t look away. His eyes are fixed on the rings like there’s nothing else he’ll ever want to look at instead. 

And the beers have finally caught up enough with Stevie that—without even hesitating—she asks, “Does it feel different?”

“From what?”

“Last time.”

Patrick frowns as he figures out what she means— 

Then he laughs, so sudden and strong that it almost makes her jump. “God, I—there’s not—” he tips his head back. “I don’t even know how to describe…” he keeps laughing, but quieter, more to himself. Then he shakes his head. “I don’t want to make it sound like I—like I was _miserable_ or anything. I wouldn’t have proposed to Rachel if I honestly didn’t want to.” His face scrunches up. “At least, I hope I wouldn’t have.” 

He takes another long, slow drink. “The big thing was, I thought it would make her happy. I mean, I _knew_ it would make her happy; we’d talked about it, a lot. And I knew that she was happier about it than I was, and—” he laughs, “I did all this mental gymnastics to convince myself that that was a good thing. Like, it was good to marry her to make _her_ happy, like it’s… selfless, like it’s morally superior to marry someone for altruistic reasons. Just so I could make myself think it was good that I wasn’t excited.”

“God, sounds like you were real fun back then.”

“Yeah, I was a hit at parties.”

Stevie opens her mouth to point out that he’s _still_ not any fun at parties— 

“Don’t,” he warns. 

She rolls her eyes, but magnanimously keeps her comment to herself. 

“The thing that finally made me snap was…” his expression tightens. “It was just so permanent, y’know? I always felt like there was going to be some magical fix, a little ways in the future. The next ‘step’, or whatever, was always the thing that I thought would make it finally feel right. But I eventually realized that marriage is basically the last step, and if it _didn’t_ fix everything, then that was… it. And thinking about it like that, the idea of being with her _forever_ was—it just—” he makes a soft, helpless noise. “I felt trapped. The concept of ‘the rest of my life’ was, I don’t know. Kinda terrifying.” 

He looks down at the rings, and—fuck, Stevie braces herself; she knows this is gonna be _awful._

“And now, with David, I—” he cuts himself off with a laugh. “I’m gonna say something gross. You’re gonna hate it.”

“I’ve hated everything you’ve ever said to me.”

He laughs again, but he’s clearly undeterred. “I just…” he shrugs. “I’m so excited for the rest of my life, as long as it’s with him.”

“Oh come _on._ ” 

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all. “But now it’s out of my system. I’m done for the night, I promise.” He gently bumps her shoulder with his, which is… fond, and itchy, and she’s not sure if she kinda likes it, or absolutely hates it. But he closes the ring box and sets it down, so she almost believes him. Almost. Maybe.

The good news is that—now that he’s done secretly plying her with alcohol to make her susceptible to talking Feelings—Patrick is finally interested in catching up to her. Stevie can still feel her feet by the time they run out of beer, so she makes the executive decision to break out the bottle of fancy gin. It’s David’s, and it’s expensive, but Stevie decides that he owes her since she just like, got him a husband, or whatever. 

And from there on, the night is _finally_ what Stevie was promised when she agreed to it: alcohol, too many episodes of Cutthroat Kitchen, increasingly contentious games of Exploding Kittens, and an entire bag of chicken nuggets from the back of the freezer. Stevie stops feeling the ache in her feet (and her hips and her abs and shoulders and her _wrists,_ somehow, because dancing is hell) around midnight, just in time for them to realize that neither of them are in any shape to get her home. Since David is at the motel anyway, it only takes a bit of prodding to convince her to spend the night. And then it only takes a bit more prodding to convince her that the bed is a much better option than the stupidly tiny loveseat. 

(“You gonna be able to remember I’m not David? I don’t want to wake up with you spooning me.”

“Trust me, if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s sharing a bed with a woman and not touching her.”)

They’re both well past the point of caring enough to clean up; the debris can wait until morning. Patrick stumbles his way through an approximation of his bedtime routine, while Stevie scavenges for pajamas in David’s half of the dresser.

And weirdly, it’s not even weird. She settles onto David’s pillow, and it feels so not-weird that she pulls out her phone for a selfie, to show how not-weird it is. She throws up a peace sign, and frames it so it gets the DON’T across her chest, and Patrick over her shoulder, giving a cartoonish grin and a thumbs-up. She sends it to David.

dumbass  
  
stole ur booze ur bed and ur boyfrend  
  
and shirt but that doesnt start with b  
  
aslo thats nt stealing cuz i still own yr clothes  
  


She doesn’t get a response, but she hears Patrick’s phone buzz, and then a quiet giggle—so apparently the two of them are talking about her behind her back right in front of her, so, great.

The phones get plugged in, the lamps get turned off, and it’s… 

It’s quiet, and dark, and this is a really comfy bed, and Stevie is still boozy enough to not have a super firm grasp on her decision making. And all of that blends together in her head and results in a baffling, _horrible_ desire to open her mouth again. She feels powerless as she hears herself ask, “What if he says no?”

“Ahhhhhh, don’t say that!” Patrick whimpers. “I mean, it’s. As long as he still wants to be with me, that’s—it’d be fine, I’d be able to be fine with it. But I just—” he lets out a full-blown, petulant whine. “I just want him to be my husband, dammit.”

Stevie can blame the childish tone on the alcohol, but she knows the words are dead sober. “I do not get how your mind works.”

“Really? Not at all?”

“No?” She wrinkles her nose. “I guess, I—maybe I get marriage, as like… an abstract concept. But the reality of it is. Really not my thing.”

“What’s the difference, concept and the thing?” Patrick slurs.

Stevie squirms, tugging at the blankets. “Like, sometimes I think I could want it, but then I think about actually _having_ it, and I just—” she gags. “Nightmare. No thank you. Not for me.”

Patrick chuckles dryly, and Stevie reconsiders the overt disgust in her tone. “But like, it’s all good, for you,” she backpedals. “If you want it, that’s good, that’s—good. I get the… I dunno, the appeal, or whatever. I get why people want it.” Her stomach twists. This isn’t something she should be saying, this isn’t something she _says,_ to anyone. It’s just the booze and the dark room and the fucking menace of a person she’s spent this night with—those are the reasons; that’s what’s making her incapable of _stopping_ against all better judgement. “I don’t think I’ll ever want to be with anyone like that, but I like the idea of—I want the—I like the… choice of it. I don’t want to actually be with someone, but I like the idea of someone choosing me, for once.”

And Patrick— 

Laughs. He laughs at her.

Stevie feels herself shrivel, her whole body tensing. “Not actually a joke, but thanks, I guess?” she snaps, trying to make her sloppy voice sound as cruel as possible.

“No, sorry, no.” Patrick turns his head to face her (Stevie keeps her eyes locked firmly on the ceiling). “It’s just… if you wanna put all that value just on romance, that’s fine, but, it’s kinda your fault, y’know? If you’re gonna willfully ignore all the other ways people choose you, that’s on you.”

Stevie frowns, because, “That’s—that’s not…”

“What, you need a damn list?” Patrick sounds like he’s having _fun_ with this, even as Stevie thinks she might actually vomit. But, of course, he doesn’t wait for an answer. “Mr. Rose chose you to be his business partner. Mrs. Rose chose you to be Sally—which is a big deal, for her. David chose you to be the most important person in his life. And I chose you, for this.” He laughs, but this time it’s clearly at himself. “I know, first time I told you was a total accident. But I was always gonna tell you. On purpose. I only asked for _your_ blessing. And s'not that I didn’t have any other options; I specifically chose you. I didn’t want to have this secret with anyone else.”

And then he… stops. Like he was rattling off a fucking grocery list, and not… 

Stevie’s throat is tight. She swallows, but it doesn’t help. Her face is hot. And it takes a lot—it takes _all_ of her willpower to not bolt out of this stupid bed and flee into the night. She blinks, and breathes, and swallows. And when she thinks she can bear it, she glances over—

Patrick is looking at her, and his face is _horrible._ She snaps her eyes right back to the ceiling, and makes a noise that she hopes sounds like annoyance, and not like she’s trying to clear this… something, out of her throat. 

When she thinks her voice will hold, she says, “Fuck off.”

Patrick laughs, just an exhale out of his nose. “Sorry. I’ll shut up.” And because he apparently has some common decency after all, he curls up, faced away from her. 

Stevie wants to curl up, too, facing her own wall. But she can’t move. But that’s… fine, because she’s sore. That’s it, that’s all. She’s drunk and sore and sleepy and she can’t move and breathing is a little tricky and that’s fine. It’s fine. 

Stevie’s always liked him. Right from the beginning, back when he was just Patrick and not Patrick-and-David. They’ve always gotten along in a way that Stevie’s… not used to. Even she and David didn’t start out that… fine. That good. And since getting along with Patrick has always been an effortless way to annoy David, there’s always been a strong motivation to keep liking him, as boldly as possible. 

And she likes them. She always has. She’s pretty sure she saw how good they are for each other before either of them actually figured it out. That’s not a problem. That’s never been a problem.

But.

But sometimes, every now and then, there’s this stupid, junior high voice in the back of her head that she can’t shut up. It was there before Patrick was even a thing, and it never went away. And it’s always told her that someday, eventually, inevitably, David will find someone, and it’ll be great, it’ll be fantastic, and she’ll get ditched. Abandoned in the cafeteria to eat lunch on her own. 

It’s petty. It’s so fucking stupid and she _knows_ that. But there’s a little part of her that secretly feared that’s how it would go. David gets a boyfriend, and Stevie loses her only friend. 

But now, David is getting a husband. And Stevie gets two friends. 

It’s not how she thought the math would work out. 

She should… say something, right? That’s what this whole night has been about, and she’s already said plenty of embarrassing shit, and she can blame it on being drunk so there’s no reason not to. It doesn’t matter that she’s blinking too hard and her heart is maybe pounding a little. She wants to say something nice, so she should say it. That’s how this works. That’s how being a good person works. 

She takes a breath. 

“I never thought I’d meet anyone who annoys me more than David does. You two deserve each other.”

Patrick hums. “Thanks.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

“Obviously.”

Stevie scoffs, fighting against that awful, squishy tone in his voice. “Whatever.”

Patrick hums again, and snuggles further into the blankets. “Goodnight, Stevie.”

She doesn’t answer. She blinks, and breathes, and waits for the itchiness to crawl out from under her skin. 

It takes too long, so she reaches over and grabs her phone. 

dumbass  
  
i hate your boyfriend  
  


She goes to put the phone back on the nightstand, but it buzzes in her hand before she has the chance.

dumbass  
  
i hate your boyfriend  
  
😘  
  


**Author's Note:**

> By popular demand (by which I mean literally no one but myself asked for this): Self-Indulgent Nonsense - Part 2!
> 
> I originally considered writing this as a very short epilogue to "maybe not the way we thought we planned", and Ho Boy did it snowball from there! This fic is dedicated to everyone who responded so beautifully to the first fic. I honestly didn't think anyone would be interested in it, and your support is 100% what gave me the confidence to write this. Your encouragement means the world to me. 💜💜💜 
> 
> Title taken from "Married" from Cabaret, because I still haven't forgiven Dan for robbing us of Ronnie and Bob's Schneider and Schultz. 
> 
> As always, thank you so much for reading! I'd always love to hear from you, either here or over on my [tumblr](https://my-nameless-bliss.tumblr.com/post/634816733421649920)! Wash your hands, check in with someone you love, and take care of yourselves!


End file.
